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With less than a week to go, I'm staggering towards the climax of the season untouched by even a smidgen of festive bonhomie.
According to tradition, I should by now have received six geese-a-laying, five golden rings, four calling birds, three french hens, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree, and yet my immediate surrounds remain blissfully free of unsolicited bird life.
I haven't received a gift yet, or given one, have not thrown a Christmas party, or attended one, and have not wished anyone a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays or any other greeting that could in any way be construed as suggesting a interest in these annual proceedings.
I have on occasion been on the receiving end of such greetings, but shrug them off with a grunt, or scowl or a vague staring into the middle distance such as that exhibited by a dog on a hot day and people trapped in a room with Tony Leon. (Tip: send up a discreet flare and wait for emergency assistance.)
I have even contrived to duck both the office Christmas party this weekend and the family celebration next, pleading a previous engagement to escape the former and an inexplicable case of deep vein thrombosis to avoid flying to the latter.
I shall instead spend the holy day prostrate on the couch sucking on 27 cans of beer and watching the first three seasons of Seinfeld on DVD, safe in the knowledge that the best television comedy in history will never ambush me with a mawkish Christmas episode.
It's an experiment of sorts: is it possible to avoid Christmas altogether? Theoretically it's not, because as noted in this space last week there is always a Little Drummer Boy on the loose in the supermarket and Good King Wenceslas can pop up to ruin your day at any moment.
And don't even start me on Frosty the Snowman, the most evil of all Christmas songs because it sticks in your brain for so long you feel like charging the little bastard rent. A jolly happy soul he may well be, but don't tell me you haven't felt like shoving his corncob pipe right up his annoying button nose.
But it is possible, with some subtle manoeuvring and spectacular lying, to go quite some time avoiding direct contact with the festive virus, particularly if one is not cursed by (a) children; (b) friends with a mince pie fetish; (c) relatives within a 1 000km radius.
But it can become problematic if one associates with children who are not one's own. These little buggers can ensnare a man in Christmassy activities no matter how stiff his resistance.
It's possible to hold the festively deranged boss at bay, and even a seasonally mental mother. But children are harder to resist and I fear my experiment may come crashing to ground, probably on about Thursday. This, I was advised over the loudspeaker while buying new underwear the other day, is the date by which I should have added 10 lords-a-leaping, nine ladies dancing, eight maids-a-milking and seven swans-a-swimming to my Christmas menagerie.
But instead of constructing a small zoo in the back garden and trying to calm the frolicking lords, I suspect I'll instead be knee-deep in crap in a shop searching for gifts for assorted nieces and nephews.
Unsurprisingly, they are proving strangely resistant to the idea that we should just pretend the whole fraudulent show isn't happening. They just love it and why wouldn't they? They are growing up in an age when children in homes of even modest means expect and receive Christmas bounty that would have the Three Wise Men feeling that gold, frankincense and myrrh just didn't cut it.
Today, there are some children of my acquaintance who might show a flicker of gratitude for, say, a PlayStation, an iPod and a holiday in France. But to seriously impress them you'd want to start by presenting them with a small island off the coast of Spain and promising that their big gift - the title deed to the Moon, for example - will be personally delivered by Britney Spears and the Baby Jesus himself sometime in January.
Delaying some of the Christmas gift-giving is apparently becoming increasingly popular, particularly in blended families in which there has been some divorce and remarriage activity.
This can give rise to family arrangements involving stepmothers, stepfathers, quarter-aunts, uncles of unresolved kinship designation and platoons of grandparents who have to be bused in in shifts and children who need medical assistance by the time they've finished unwrapping all the pressies.
Thus the wisdom of staggering the gift-giving over a period of weeks. For example, the actual parents take responsibility for Christmas Day, when the little ones can focus entirely on working out how to fly the new helicopter from Mom and her third husband, without having to worry about where to park the space shuttle from Dad and His New Girlfriend Who Doesn't Like Children.
Unfortunately this has not taken off as a concept in my family and the blighters will be expecting something in the mail. So shopping I will be, unless my true love gets with the programme - in which case I'll be able to pop 12 drummers drumming, 11 pipers piping, a crateload of birds and some prancing lords in the post by the close of business on Friday.
E-mail: madworld2004@yahoo.com.au
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